The Trump Administration Has Finally Brought Us to Dystopia

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1.Donald Trump was hardly into his first full calendar year as president before a chorus of critics and pundits began to use the word “dystopian” to describe his administration and the social milieu that it seemed to precipitate. In March 2017, novelist John Feffer wrote, “Unpredictability, incompetence, and demolition are the dystopian watchwords of the current moment, as the world threatens to fragment before our very eyes.” Months later, Entertainment Weekly ran an article with the hypertext title, “How the Trump era made dystopia cool again.” The A.V. Club and Vulture both proposed that we had reached “peak dystopia.” Writing for The New Yorker, Jill Lepore described our era as “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction.” (Not of, but “for.”) In early 2018, when the internet was briefly galvanized by talk of Oprah Winfrey running against Donald Trump in 2020, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane described that potential contest as “troublingly dystopian.”

What a curious, discomfiting situation we find ourselves in when the buzzword à la mode is 130 years old, and the literary genre we once relied on to explicate life behind the Iron Curtain is now apparently reflective of contemporary America. But what exactly is it about the Trump administration that makes us reach for such specific literary terminology? Is it the sudden resurgence of white supremacy and fascist sympathies in the American heartland, providing a speculative path toward American authoritarianism? Perhaps, but neither racism nor fascism are requirements of the genre. Are we terrified that this administration will instigate a world-ending nuclear conflict with North Korea, and/or Russia—and/or a devastating economic war with China, and/or Europe? If so, the relevant literary genre would be apocalyptic, not necessarily dystopian. Or do we say “dystopian” hyperbolically—reflecting our anxieties about a nightmarish social sphere of distress, confusion, and disorientation? That might be better described as surreal, or absurd. Are we alarmed by the hard pivot away from professionalism, decency, and decorum? Issues like these are more at home in the novel of manners, such as Pride and Prejudice. Or are we simply dismayed and alarmed by the convergence of an outrageous, semi-competent administration and a general mood of anti-intellectualism? That would be a job for satire. Trump himself—bumbling, bombastic, egoic, unaware, unpredictable, unread—would be more at home as the quixotic protagonist of a picaresque, or as a delusional child king in a fairy tale.

It is my suspicion that we call some things “dystopian” for the same reason we sometimes abuse correct usage of “gothic,” “ironic,” or “Kafkaesque”: We like the sound of it, and we enjoy invoking its vaguer associations. But if we’re going by conventional definitions, it is arguable that there was nothing specifically or egregiously dystopian about the Trump administration until last April, when the administration announced a new “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossing, becoming the first White House in memory to implement a standing procedure for separating migrant children from their parents, even as they attempted to surrender themselves legally in a plea for sanctuary.

Dystopia is a rich, heterogeneous, and dynamic category of film and literature. However, when we look at the most successful, enduring works of this genre, we find the same institution caught in the crosshairs of various fictional totalitarian regimes, again and again: the independent and autonomous nuclear family.

2.Dystopian fiction was preceded by utopian fiction, beginning in 1516 with Thomas More’s novel Utopia. (The synthetic Greek toponym “Utopia” was simply More’s joking name for his setting—an invented South American island—as the word literally means “no place,” or “nowhere.”) Utopian novels were immensely popular in 19th-century England, as humanist philosophies and medical and industrial technologies at the tail end of the Enlightenment combined to suggest a better and brighter tomorrow. Theoretically, a fruitful Eden was almost within reach. Yes, dystopia is commonly described as the opposite of utopia, but this obscures a common trope in which dystopic future societies are presented as the aftermath (or consequence) of failed attempts to bring about an actual utopia.

Perhaps the precursor to dystopian fiction is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s anti-utopian novel Notes from the Underground, published in 1864. Dostoevsky’s skeptical narrator monologues at length on the preposterousness of the idea that science and Western philosophy were ushering in a radical new era of human progress: “Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne.” Dostoevsky’s intention, partly, was to deride and pick apart Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s utilitarian, materialist novel, What Is to Be Done?, in which characters make grand, romantic statements about the joyful founding of an eternal, collectivist utopia. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man sees two major flaws in this thinking. First, if given the opportunity to submit to rational prescriptions for a better life, people would rather be free to suffer. Second, idealism—when taken too seriously—tends to breed dissociation, distortion, and interpersonal alienation.

Today we associate a handful of qualities with the concept of dystopia: governmental overreach, unnatural social configurations, paranoia, state-driven propaganda, digitally panoptic surveillance, and other alienating technologies. However, none of these characteristics are intrinsic to the genre, just as dystopian fiction isn’t necessarily satirical or allegorical, regardless of the popularity of Black Mirror. Dystopia is such a diverse and mutable canon overall that there are no essential commonalities—with one possible exception: a significant distortion of family relations.

Nearly all landmark works of dystopian fiction feature an oppressive governmental order that interferes with what we might term the “natural” process of family-making: choosing a partner and raising a family freely and relatively unencumbered by external power structures. This is observed from the outset in the seminal dystopian novel We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, published in Russia in 1921. Set in the walled-off, hyper-rational future society One State, in which sexual liaisons are overseen by the government, the conflict in We is precipitated by a moment of illicit flirtation, and the principal transgression upon which the plot later hangs is an unlicensed pregnancy.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, fetuses gestate in artificial wombs and are raised by the state. Here, too, an illegal pregnancy is a major plot point, and the word “father” is an epithet. In 1984, George Orwell’s Oceania allows marriage but prohibits divorce, as well as non-procreative sex. Winston Smith’s central offense is his illegal affair with Julia, and it is her whom he must betray to restore his safety and good standing. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag’s unhappy, alienating marriage is the consequence of an illiterate, spiritually unwell society. In Lois Lowry’s The Giver, infants are not raised by their biological mothers but are assigned to families—if they are not summarily euthanized. Even in the bubblegum dystopia The Hunger Games, the action commences with Katniss’s motherly intervention on her little sister’s behalf, sparing her from certain death, allowing her to continue to have a childhood.

The most influential dystopian novel of this moment is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, thanks to the Hulu miniseries adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss, previously a different sort of feminist icon in AMC’s Mad Men. In Atwood’s novel, a near-future United States is replaced by an Old-Testament Christian theonomy in which healthy young women are forced to bear children for high-status men and their infertile wives. This feature of Atwood’s world-building can’t exactly be chalked up to pure fantasy crafted in the welter of creative genius. To borrow a phrase, we’ve seen this before. In an essay for Glamour last year, Jenae Holloway writes that she is “frustrated and jealous that [her] white feminist allies are able to digest The Handmaid’s Tale through the lens of a fictitious foreboding”—in other words, that the show does not strike them as it strikes her: with a sense of “déjà vu.” Holloway’s essay reminds us that an even cursory look into slavery in the Americas reveals separations of children from parents, forced adoptions, and rape as standard to the experience. Breaking up families is not simply a systematic and normalized aspect of state control; it is a requirement to maintain the system itself.

Historically, human slavery may have been a relatively limited phenomena in Atwood’s Canada; however, indigenous families were routinely shattered by administrative bodies between 1944 and 1984, including 20,000 children in the “Sixties Scoop” alone. Conventionally, the non-academic reader or viewer only associates these phenomena with science fiction when the writer works in this palette explicitly—Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and her short story “Bloodchild” come to mind—but once one considers the potential for reverberations of chattel slavery in literary dystopias, one begins to see them everywhere: in Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron,” wherein a teenage übermensch is taken from his parents, who later witness his televised execution; in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” where citizens of an agrarian community cannot protect their spouses or children from ritualized public execution; and most obviously Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which depicts a perfect society enabled by the unending agony of a single imprisoned, tortured child.

None of this is to say that participation in a family is categorically “natural,” or what legitimizes one’s existence. The world has more than enough space for people who abstain from family-making. Nor does this observation require us to attempt to define what a family is. What is important is to note that our most successful, compelling, and enduring literary dystopias consistently present antagonists to the nuclear family dynamic. They create rigid legal frameworks around everything from sexual union to rearing of children. This is the dreaded commonality at the root of mainline dystopian fiction: the simple formula, “government authority > family independence.”

Whether you were raised by biological or adoptive parents, older siblings, or more distant relatives—or by a foster parent, or some other surrogate or legal guardian—what you share with the vast majority of humans is that you were once the object of a small, imperfect social unit responsible for your protection and care. This is the primary social contract, based not on law or philosophy, but on love and trust. For better and worse, our bonds to our families pre-exist and preponderate the accident of our nationality. Accepting this truth may be the first test of a legitimate state. It is the illegitimate, insecure regime that seeks to disrupt and broadly supersede the imperfect moral authority of reasonable, well-intended parents—in all of their many forms and situations.

3.In separating migrant families seeking amnesty, President Trump brought us into dystopia at last. It is a small comfort that he clearly knew from the outset that this action was morally untenable. He told reporters that he “hated” the policy of family separation, claiming that it was “the Democrats’ fault,” the repercussion of a do-nothing Congress. In reality, neither Barack Obama nor George W. Bush separated migrant children from their parents as a standard practice. There is no law or settlement that requires detained families to be broken up, and the general legal consensus was that if Trump were being honest—if family separation had actually been an unwanted, pre-existing policy—he could have ended it, overnight, “with a phone call.”

As usual, executive dissimulation instigated bizarre performances lower down the chain of command: On June 18, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen held an extraordinary press conference in which she denied the existence of an official family-separation policy while simultaneously arguing for its legitimacy. Nielsen’s denials were particularly astonishing as two months before her press conference, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced—publicly and on camera—the instigation of family separation as a deterrent to improper border crossings. In fact, the DHS had already published guidelines explaining the system of family separation and admitted to detaining approximately 2,000 migrant children. The truth was that the institution of a heartless, zero-tolerance border policy was a calculated effort led by administration strategist Stephen Miller, who was also a key architect of the travel ban in 2017. Writing for The Atlantic, McKay Koppinscharacterizes Miller’s push for this policy as overtly xenophobic and intentionally inhumane, designed to appeal to Trump’s base while also sowing chaos among his opponents.

To our nation’s credit, outrage was abundant and came from all corners. Evangelist Franklin Grahamsaid that family separation was “disgraceful.” Laura Bushwrote that the policy was “cruel” and that it broke her heart. Even former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramuccidescribed the policy as “inhumane” and “atrocious.” Governors from eight states announced they would withdraw or deny National Guard troops previously promised to help secure the Southwest border. Even Ivanka Trump, who has yet to be accused of hypersensitivity, allegedly asked her father to change course on family separations at the border. Condemnation also came from both houses of Congress, with Senate Republicans vowing to end family separations if Trump did not. On June 20, after repeatedly claiming that only Congress could end family separations at the border, Trump reversed course, signing an executive order that would ostensibly keep migrant families together during future detentions. Technically, this order allowed family separations to continue as a discretionary practice, until the ACLU brought a lawsuit before Judge Dana Sabraw of the Federal District Court in San Diego, who issued an injunction that temporarily halted family separations and required all separated migrant children be reunited with their parents within 30 days—a requirement that was not met.

For many migrants, significant emotional and psychological damage has already been done. Recently, dozens of female migrants in a Seattle-area detention facility were separated from their children, having to endure hearing them crying through the walls. One such detainee informed U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal that she told a Border Patrol agent she wanted to see her children, to which the agent replied, “You will never see your children again. Families don’t exist here.” That same week, a Honduran man named Marco Antonio Muñoz, who had been separated from his wife and toddler after crossing the Southwest border, hanged himself in his Texas holding cell.

4.Not only has the executive branch of this government launched an assault on the dignity and sanctity of the family; they have simultaneously begun work to erode the permanence of citizenship, through a process of “denaturalization”—an action not attempted since the paranoid 1950s of Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare. This would transfer the authority to strip citizenship from the court system to law enforcement agencies, such as DHS, or ICE, who would presumably go looking for naturalized Americans who may have misrepresented themselves in some way during their application for citizenship. This situation would subject naturalized citizens to the paranoia and potential exploitation of an East German-like police state, in which they are under warrantless surveillance, threatened by informants, and potentially expugnable for nothing more heinous than a paperwork error. Simultaneously, conservatives such as Tucker Carlsonhave argued for a referendum on birthright citizenship, the foundation of the equality Americans purport to enjoy. This fits with the administration’s pattern of using diverse methodologies to thwart and rescind legal and illegal residency alike, in what has increasingly come to look like a new front in the multi-pronged effort to alter the racial and cultural demographics of the electorate. This, too, conforms to the genre of dystopia: the existence of a large and oppressed underclass living adjacent to privileged elites, who are sometimes floored to learn that not everyone perceives the status quo as the next-best thing to a true utopia.

If given even tacit approval, policies like separating families at the border will lead to an open season on immigrants—legal residents and undocumented migrants alike—as well as millions of other natural and naturalized citizens who are not both white and perfectly fluent in English. We will see an emboldened expansion of unconstitutional checkpoints at places like airports and bus depots. We will see the normalization of racial profiling. Our children will see their friends taken out of school without warning. They will be disappeared.

But if we’ve read our dystopian literature, we are prepared. To a degree, we are insulated. We can understand this moment in history, and how comforting it must feel to curl up inside the illusory sense of security offered by an impenetrable border, or a leader who boldly intones our weaker ideas and more shameful suspicions, or some fatuous, utopian aphorism about making a nation great again. We will remind ourselves and each other what is at stake. We will remember that the only thing we need to know about utopia is that nobody actually lives there.

I knew an MFA candidate in grad school who had already written a novel and even had an agent, and who, whenever Ernest Hemingway was mentioned, would instantly come down with a migraine so severe that he had to retire to bed with a cold compress on his forehead for eight hours. It was as though Hemingway were a kind of god whose very name could smite his acolytes. My friend, needless to say, never published and did not become a writer. The weight of his hero was just too much for him.

Writers have their touchstone authors. Marcel Proust is mine, and has been for almost 30 years. I learned French primarily because I wanted to read Proust in the original. I’d made my way through the Scott Moncrieff translation over a period of eight or nine months while living in the usual reduced circumstances of an aspiring writer in Cambridge, England. He was deep-sea diving into themes that I’d begun to introduce into my own work: time, memory, the past. In French his prose is sinewy and supple, much stronger and bolder than he comes off in the Scott Moncrieff translation. But it was how Proust dealt with character that most fascinated me.

By my count, I own some six biographies of Marcel Proust, not including biographical material contained in other volumes, such as his devoted housekeeper and amanuensis Céleste Albaret’s valuable Monsieur Proust, as well as those books dedicated to one aspect or another of his life. For years the most authoritative biography in English was that of George D. Painter, who wrote under the assumption that In Search of Lost Time was a way into the life of its author; an approach Proust utterly disdained. As Proust wrote in what is considered an early version of the Search: “A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices.” Thus, many assumed that this asthmatic hypochondriac with his fur-lined coat, pale complexion, and drooping mustache could never possibly create anything more substantial than a flowery thank-you note to his hostess. Instead he produced one of the great works of literature.

Also one of the least-completed. Most readers who take the plunge get through Swann’s Way and give up. Yet once you forge ahead in the seven-volume work you see the pace increase, the humor deepen, the obsessions grow even more obsessive. This isn’t a rambling, stream-of-consciousness book of memories lost and found; it’s a novel with a subtle and solid architecture, where in its last volume, Time Regained, the shape of the work comes finally into focus. The man who tells this story, the “I” of the book, known as the Narrator, isn’t the author, per se, though once or twice they share a first name. And the book you’ve just finished reading isn’t quite the book the Narrator now sets out to write: it’s as though the author and his novel were a kind of optical illusion: where is the reality, where is the fiction? And what is this we’ve just read? A book about a man who wants to write a book about what we’ve just read?

The arc of the novel is the Narrator’s search for understanding the nature of time and the meaning of the past, in the end learning that, though the body ages and the mind weakens, the past never dies, it’s as vivid as when it was first experienced: always retrievable, always alive within us. The Narrator is something of an undercover agent. He’s an outsider who yearns to be accepted by the higher circles of le tout Paris, in particular the salons of the Duchess de Guermantes and that of her cousin, the Princesse de Guermantes. Proust himself, never one to shun the salons of le beau monde, had the perfect disguise: mix with high society and French nobility, look and listen and be tolerated, while few would suspect this social butterfly would ever make anything of himself. And yet the entire time he was observing, taking in not just how people spoke but how they looked, how they gestured, how they presented themselves both when in public and in their unguarded moments (something that Pablo Picasso recognized when he and Proust were at the same gathering towards the end of the author’s life: “Look, he’s keeping his eyes out for models,” as Jean Hugo quoted him as saying, though Benjamin Taylor rightly points out that all the models had already been found; some of them in that very room).

There’s a key scene in the novel when the Narrator, still a young man, happens to witness an exchange between the Baron de Charlus and Jupien, a tailor, soon to be Charlus’s secretary and afterwards the owner of a brothel, which the Narrator sees as something like an insect being drawn to pollen. He observes the baron’s little dance of seduction, how he now approaches, now retreats, until the two men have vanished inside Jupien’s waistcoat shop. Now the Narrator knows something that no one would suspect him of knowing. I spy with my very own eye, Proust seems to be saying, and I know everything. In many ways the central character of this long novel, Charlus, so robust and masculine at the start, then becoming an old man, retains something of the decrepit dignity of King Lear. As a creator of character, Proust is something of a Cubist: his people are never seen in only one dimension; they’re constantly changeable, and changing, and all of those faces exist on the same plane.

In Search of Lost Time is, I’ve always felt, aside from being a kind of detective story, something of a spy novel, which may stem from the fact that its author was both Jewish and gay, firmly placed as outside the perceived mainstream. The fact that gay men were ostracized (though in some quarters quietly tolerated) needs no elaboration here. And with the Dreyfus Affair being the story of the day when Proust was a young man — a story that didn’t quite go away for some 12 years — the population was divided, with anti-Dreyfusism becoming to a degree synonymous with anti-Semitism. Proust campaigned on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus. “Was this because he felt Jewish?” his latest biographer, Benjamin Taylor, asks. “Certainly not. Proust saw himself as what he was: the non-Jewish son of a Jewish mother. The Dreyfus Affair was for him, first and last, a clear-cut miscarriage of justice that demanded reversal. In this he was like most of the Jews, half-Jews, and baptized Jews who rallied to the cause in 1897 and 1898; they did so not because Dreyfus was Jewish but because he was innocent.”

The definitive biography in English is by William C. Carter, and in French we have the exhaustive, encyclopedic and equally valuable doorstopper by Jean-Yves Tadié, which has been translated into English. Just released from Yale University Press is Benjamin Taylor’s slim but rich volume, Proust: The Search. By now we know pretty much everything there is to learn about Proust, though the diaries of Reynaldo Hahn, considered by scholars to be, as Taylor calls it, “the holy grail of Proust biographers,” are under embargo until 2036, and will undoubtedly shed a great deal of light on this important relationship. So what does Taylor have to offer that’s new?

One might think that, as Taylor’s biography is part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, the author would be focusing on Proust’s life as a Jew. Though Proust’s Jewish mother, Jeanne Weil, never converted, his father, Adrien Proust, wished to have his children baptized into the Catholic church. Taylor, I think wisely, doesn’t make much of this, and turns his attention to the life of a writer, not just a Jewish writer, giving us a slender but rich work of biography that is stylishly written and covers all the bases of Proust’s life and career. Because so many of the highlights and details are well known to those who’ve read the earlier biographies, he succeeds not so much by narrowing the focus but by shedding light on the salient points of the author’s life and by reminding us why Proust is such a touchstone for so many.

However one reads the Search, when you come out at the other end of the experience you have become a different person; not just because something like eight months or a year has passed and you also have changed over that time, perhaps falling in love, or out of love, or becoming a parent, or finding yourself uprooted, but because you now see the world through the eyes of this author, just as, Proust writes in his novel, once Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings were seen, people would say of a woman passing by, “That’s a Renoir woman.” “To succeed thus in gaining recognition,” Proust writes elsewhere in the novel, “the original painter, the original writer proceeds on the lines adopted by oculists. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always agreeable to us. When it is at an end the operator says to us: ‘Now look!’ And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear.” And that is what Proust does to you: you begin to define the world around you through the eyes of this artist.

There’s an eerie moment in the fourth volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Sodom and Gomorrah that stopped me dead the first time I came across it. In a meditation on sleeping and waking and memory, the author writes: “…I, the strange human being who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness.” I had the strange sensation that the author, by then dead more than 50 years, was somehow still very much with us as he describes his exact circumstance, both as the voice of the book’s Narrator and as the person writing this book, as though he knew that one day someone would come across this line and sense the living author behind it. For that moment he knows you’re there; in those few words he is still alive. As he wrote upon hearing of the writer John Ruskin’s death to his friend Marie Nordlinger, “I am shown how paltry a thing death is when I see how vigorously this dead man lives.” Thus it is with Proust, and all our touchstones.

A mail-in card in my copy of “Richtofen’s War: The Air War 1914-1918″ reads, “Please send me your colorful brochure describing all Avalon Hill games and Play-by-Mail kits and your exclusive gaming magazine. I swear that I have the necessary grey-matter to enjoy your games.”

It was 2001 when I first listened to Yoko Ono’s music. I was young and quite stupid and mostly alone. I’d walk around New York with no particular aim, trekking from my job in midtown to a subway station in SoHo because I had nowhere better to be. I took my lunch (one-dollar coffee, banana) in the bakery across the street from my shitty office, where I’d read and smoke (indoors!). I was broke, but buying things made me feel alive. I’d pick up remainders at Coliseum Books, or vintage porn from a sidewalk vendor on Seventh Avenue. One day, on a whim, I bought Ono’s 1982 album It’s Alright (I See Rainbows). It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, on sale.

If I didn’t like Yoko Ono myself, I might think someone who called himself a fan was joking, or engaged in some other thing: adolescent contrarianism or camp, possibly diva worship of those giant Porsche sunglasses, those hats, those short shorts, those gams, the incontrovertible foreignness of Ono’s English. For a long time Ono was basically despised, the inevitable lot of someone married to a person whose fame actually may have eclipsed Christ’s. Fools hate foreigners, and fools hate women, but a lot of people who ought to know better hate the avant-garde, and a lot of people who ought to know better hate the politically engaged, and a lot of people who ought to know better hate polymaths, and Ono is all those things. I think that now the line among sophisticates is that Ono’s musical project is so idiosyncratic you can respect it without quite enjoying it, but I’ve never considered myself a sophisticate.

I associate Yoko Ono’s music with our first year of George W. Bush’s ruinous presidency, prophetess for a new year/decade/century/millennium. That September morning, I watched smoke pluming up over the Williamsburg Savings Bank (then dentist’s offices, now luxury condominiums) from my bedroom window. I strolled through Fort Greene Park, where people, no doubt driven mad by watching television, were playing tennis. That night, I listened to Ono’s album Rising, on headphones connected to my Discman.

That album was suited to that day: war has long been one of Ono’s abiding preoccupations, and war was in the air. “Towns burning/ Throats choking/ Watch out/ Check out.” Indeed, I did check out. I left New York to live alone in a big empty house in the woods, where I spent months writing five hundred pages of a truly horrible novel and listening to Rising repeatedly. I had no television, I had one book (The Ambassadors, for some stupid reason), and I had nightmares almost nightly. Ono entertained me. “You are a New York Woman/ I miss you/ I miss you/ I miss you, my friend,” she sang, and it seemed like she was talking about the women who would have been my friends, if I had any.

On one of the album’s later songs, “Where Do We Go From Here,” Ono sings, “Are we getting tired of blood and horror? Are we getting ready for God and terror?” That Rising was released in 1996 makes Ono seem prescient. I went back to New York in the spring of 2002 and found it so full of God and terror that I couldn’t take the subway, and broke down into tears when a lunatic at Pathmark called me a faggot. I never finished writing that novel.

It probably means I’m a philistine that I never simply listen to music; it’s a secondary consideration, something to accompany me on a commute, while washing dishes, on those rare horrible occasions I decide to go for a run. I respond to music emotionally rather than intellectually, which feels like a failing, if a common one. At some point a couple of years ago, I trained myself to write at night instead of during the day; it was easier to sustain focus after the children were asleep, and I was tired all the time because of the children anyway. I used music to modulate those late nights, giving those hours a rhythm: easy, then invigorating, then calming.

That nightly cycle almost always involved revisiting that first record of Ono’s I had bought. “My Man” is a daffy, earnest love song that’s almost certainly about John Lennon (“When he speaks/ all the birds come around”). It’s sung, rather than screamed — the notion of Ono as banshee isn’t an altogether fair one — and it calmed me. “Spec of Dust,” another song that’s probably about Lennon, a paean to the idea that love is timeless, made me sad. “Why do I miss you so/ if you’re just a spec of dust/ floating, endlessly, amongst a billion stars?”

That record, with its songs of love and rage, made me remember being a dumb twenty-something, full of both: love for some theoretical boyfriend, rage at my creative/financial/professional impotence. Most feel this way as teens and get into punk rock or start a shitty band all their own, but I had an arrested adolescence, not uncommon, I think, when you grow up gay but refuse to think about it, and so I had Yoko Ono. Listening to her in my thirties, in the middle of the night, my husband and children asleep upstairs, I remembered the years in which I was without a husband, without children, and without the discipline to write a book.

I love hearing people’s advice about books to read, exhibitions to attend, films to see, but I am utterly incurious about what music people recommend, because I ask that music perform this service for me, that it entertain me in the moment while also offering some memory of a moment long passed. Dionne Warwick reminds me of those early days of parenthood, my older son lolling around on a blanket and frowning; Kate Bush’s sixth record reminds me so much of a desperate summer I spent lovelorn in Boston that I can barely bear to listen to it. It’s an imperfect way of listening, of consuming, of course; emotions ruin everything.

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There are the songs I enjoy because they remind me of some previous time, some previous self, and there are the songs I enjoy because they are tidy, perfect texts of which I am professionally jealous. Ono has always had a flair for language. Undoubtedly her best-known work is the phrase “War is Over! If You Want It,” a line in “Happy Xmas,” the song she co-wrote with her late husband, but more famously the advertising slogan of Yoko Ono Inc., on behalf of all humanity, stark black on pure white in filthy Times Square.

There’s an unadorned clarity to her writing, which might have something to do with her long association with Fluxus, the self-serious art movement that preferred strong words and uncollectable action and performance to a traditional conception of art. The movement was big on disarming straight talk. Ono’s book Grapefruit is pure Fluxus: silly and impossible instructions for actions, process as product. I love that you still see pretty undergrads buying copies of it at the Strand every fall. This is why Ono is so great at Twitter, a medium where she has had a renaissance — she’s been able to talk directly to an audience that might otherwise not know much about her beyond the obvious.

Ono’s oeuvre contains many turns of phrase that I envy — one of my favorite songs is her “All Day Long I Felt Like Smashing My Face in a Clear Glass Window” which has the very clarity that makes her tweets, and Grapefruit, so perfect. Her songs are poetry that never sound much like poetry, unlike many of Morrissey’s songs, which I can never listen to when I work because I end up writing ersatz Smiths lyrics, with opaque references to the royal family.

But of course the real standard by which you measure a song is more animal than intellectual. In the story “Signs and Symbols,” Nabokov wrote of referential mania, the delusion that all the world — the most innocuous action, the simple existence of some thing — is somehow about you. I imagine we all suffer from this mania when it comes to judging art (hence this passion to see ourselves in the pages of a book) but of course, there’s some other, ineffable thing to the equation. Ono has written a lot of great songs. She’s also written a lot of not great songs, as have most people engaged in this pursuit. The sound of some of Ono’s songs — “She Gets Down on Her Knees,” “I Have a Woman Inside My Soul,” “Loneliness,” “Sisters O Sisters” — simply works for me; music and the savage beast and all that.

Ono can and does caterwaul, and I get why people snicker at that. It’s aggressive and weird and disorienting and to laugh at it is an obvious response, if a superficial one. The live version of “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” on Ono’s 1972 record with Lennon, Some Time in New York City, is bracing, electric, astonishing. You needn’t know the backstory — Kyoko is Ono’s daughter, the subject of a custody dispute so bitter they were wholly separated for decades — to hear the raw expression of pain leavened by maternal comfort in Ono’s screams. In the soundtrack to Ono’s remarkably unsettling short film “Fly,” she delivers a vocal performance that defies description. It’s worth listening to, even if you can only manage to listen to it once; I think the same can be fairly said of the composer Kaija Saariaho or many other difficult artists. But leave aside this aggressively avant-garde work if you like; “The Death of Samantha” and “Walking on Thin Ice” are great rock and roll songs. It’s incredible to me that the same artist could manage to have made both.

*

My children are older now, and I’ve gone soft, the abbreviated schedule of their infant sleep somehow forgotten. A few weeks ago, I tried to reclaim the night for myself, those stretches of hours that had proved so fertile, so essential, only a couple of years ago. It was in part superstition and in part the simple need to keep myself awake, but I tried to recreate the specific rhythm of those productive nights: ease, then energy, then quietude. I began with the Brandenberg Concertos, but Bach’s cool mathematics often make me sleepy. I played “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” to rouse myself, then the computer offered me “Is Winter Here to Stay?,” a song of Ono’s that I’ve long liked. I was surprised to find that what I remembered, with a sensory clarity that was almost frightening, was not that time alone in a far-away house in 2001 but a similar night alone in the house I still call home. I remembered two years ago, I remembered a tumbler of watery whisky, damp with condensation, the oppressive heat of New York in June, the lack of absolute silence even at two o’clock in the morning, the reassuring sense that everyone I loved was asleep upstairs.

It’s a confounding thing that art can endure. I don’t mean over the ages — what does that matter, we’re destroying the planet — but in our lives. Art is a conversation between you and someone you’ve probably never met, and that conversation can continue for so long. Yoko Ono, who once reminded me of being twenty-three and watching the world blow up, now reminds me of being thirty-six, old enough to have built a world anew for myself. I don’t know why this should be, but I’m grateful that it is. When she screams don’t worry, I almost believe her.

Image: I bought this oddity on eBay in the middle of the night. It purports to be a wire service news bulletin, and I can’t imagine it’s not authentic because who would fake such a thing? The manner in which Ono is discussed in this says a great deal. I like to imagine Ono, who has played with language throughout her long career, would be amused at rather than hurt by its casual cruelty. It’s dated the day after John Lennon was murdered.

My son turned six in March, and among the many presents he received on his birthday — Hot Wheels tracks, Lego sets, a bag of eerily gelatinous sand — was Roald Dahl’sDanny the Champion of the World. This gift came from me, intended as the latest in a string of Dahl books that my wife and I have read to him in recent months: Matilda, The Magic Finger, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Though I’d never heard of Danny before buying it, its description seemed right up my son’s alley: a young boy and his dad exact vengeance on a wealthy twit by stealing all his pheasants. Who doesn’t like pheasant theft?

We’d steered him towards such storybooks about a year ago, when we introduced E.B. White’sCharlotte’s Web to his steady diet of picture books. I wasn’t sure how he would take to Charlotte, with its rural setting and homicidal barnyard talk (“Almost all young pigs get murdered by the farmer…there’s a regular conspiracy around here to kill you at Christmastime”). But, like Templeton the rat slurping at a rotten egg, my son happily ate it up. He also enjoyed White’s Stuart Little, though it nearly bored me into a coma. But what I found dull and episodic, he thought of as cool. After all, Stuart is a mouse who drives a wind-up car.

After years of reading picture books to my son, this transition has been, like so many as a parent, an instance to make me stop and see that the kid is growing — like a lost front tooth or the need to buy bigger shoes. To be sure, he still likes children’s books; Mo Willems and Dr. Seuss remain very easy sells. But he approaches these longer, sparsely-illustrated stories with a new and eager seriousness, as if each is its own small project. When I ask him if he’s in the mood to hear Charlotte’s Web or Danny, it’s like asking if he wants to head outside to tinker with the car. “Sure,” he’ll say after a pause, his head cocked in consideration. “Yeah, let’s read it.”

Unlike the way he interacts with an Elephant and Piggie book or If I Ran the Zoo — a kind of wouldja-look-at-that sort of romp — his engagement with White and Dahl has been vastly different. There’s so much more to follow in these books, and so much he can’t understand. “I eased my foot off the accelerator,” says Danny as he tries to drive a car. “I pressed down the clutch and held it there. I found the gear lever and pulled it straight back, from first into second. I released the clutch and pressed on the accelerator.” What six-year-old (or, for that matter, 36-year-old) can keep such action straight? And why would my son sit still for it? If that scene had come in a Willems book, he would have squirmed like a worm on a hook. Any sustained lull in a picture book usually spells doom; a mild desperation comes over me when things aren’t “fun” enough, and I can feel my son growing restless.

But with White and Dahl and others, a lack of entertainment has not been a problem. Their books send my son to a different mental area — a deeper, spongier chamber. With no foxes in socks or bifocaled elephants, he’s forced to focus inward, where he creates the pictures himself. This is, of course, no revelation; it’s what reading is. But to see a child venture into this place for the first time has been both heartening and strange. What is he seeing in there? An animated version of Quentin Blake’s artwork? A chaotic Peter Max jumble? Something more cinematic? There is no way to know.

And it ultimately may not matter. I’m beginning to think that when my wife and I read these books to him, the story itself is somewhat beside the point. I suspect that the real draw, for him, is not just the chance to find out what happens in the next chapter, but to nestle in beside us on his football-shaped beanbag chair. Because Dahl doesn’t just make our son think differently; he draws him to us. There’s something about having to direct the action himself that makes him nudge in closer as we read. It’s as if, finally forced to explore a story without the guidance of pictures, he wants us to be near — like when he’s walking through the house after it’s gotten too dark to see.

My fondest memories of my father have to do with the same moment in my own childhood, when he read me Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. My dad had been in a classic-book-of-the month club, and his Mark Twain volumes were sturdy, slipcovered editions with plates of N.C. Wyeth art. I doubt I understood much in these books beyond their characters’ bare actions — the fence-painting, the river-rafting, the girl-irritating — and I remember almost nothing from them now. But the feeling of being on my dad’s lap, his voice deep and sonorous above me, has stuck with me through the years. His reading enabled a warmth and a closeness that otherwise wasn’t much there. He could’ve been reading the dictionary, and I would have sat there, rapt.

Because of this dynamic — the storybook’s drawing of the child to the reader — I feel closer to my son when we’re reading Roald Dahl. For all the talk of the importance of reading to your child — often eat-your-peas harangues that have more to do with a fear of future failure than enjoyment of the actual act — the emotional and physical closeness that reading facilitates doesn’t get much play. But given my own Mark Twain memories and what happens on the beanbag chair, I’ve come to consider such closeness to be vital and unique. I can think of no other time that my son will sit, his head propped on my shoulder, for a half an hour or more. That I can sense the drama popping in his mind as I read is an obvious added bonus. Reading storybooks has put us at the neat intersection of stillness and excitement.

My wife is currently reading him Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, which, as I understand it, takes Charlie into 2001 territory. Meanwhile, we’re closing in on the end of Danny the Champion of the World; we should finish in a couple of days. It’s a quiet, almost sad little story about fighting your own insignificance. But, of course, my son just likes to hear about pheasant poaching and making a rich guy mad. As I’d hoped when he unwrapped it on his birthday, he loves Danny, and begs pathetically for more when I stop reading for the night. Sometimes I give in and read another page or two. All I ask in return is that he’ll remember it fondly 30 years from now.

1.
The story of every mutant, up to a certain point and with some exceptions, is the same. For the first 12 years or so of his life he identifies as a human being. During his pubescence he manifests powers that make him more interesting than his peers. He can turn his body into iron, control weather patterns, walk through walls, read minds, or fly. He’s still technically a member of the human race. He can still mate with humans and reproduce. Yet he is also something apart, a homo superior. Some mutants can hide their identity. Others — those who develop blue skin or amphibious features, phenotypes that sometimes appear at birth — are not able to pass.

Homo sapiens see in the mutant all that they fear in themselves. Some see in the mutant a possible slave or a creature that must be annihilated. The mutant withstands waves of oppression. One year is more brutal than another. Through it all, he learns to hate himself, then to humble himself before others and sometimes to hurt himself. Some mutants find their way to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, located in Westchester County outside New York, where they learn to respect the culture of the human race, even though it seeks to either destroy or control their very being. They master their powers and transform their bodies into novel instruments.

Other mutants find themselves in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants — later simply known as the Brotherhood – where they adhere to an ideology of mutant separatism. Faced with the threat of homo sapiens supremacy and even outright genocide, they become terrorists, though, as the cliché goes, you could just as easily call them freedom fighters.

Every persecuted minority protects itself with the same litany. They hurt us. They hate us. But we have powers — our own music, religion, humor, language — they can’t take away from us. If we honor our beautiful bodies, the names the majority gives us have no power to kill us. On this score, the mutants in the X-Men and the mutants in the Brotherhood agree.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-Men in 1963, and during their run the X-Men, like the other heroes in the Marvel Universe, were Mad Men-WASPy. In 1975 Len Wein introduced a new roster that would reflect something closer to the mess of human society. The writer Chris Claremont took over the title and continued the trend throughout his very long run. Colossus, née Piotr Rasputin, is Russian. Storm, née Ororo Munroe, is Kenyan. Rogue, née Anna Marie, is from the South. Wolverine is Canadian. More minorities kept showing up in the X-Men through the years and in the early 1990s Northstar of the Canadian team Alpha Flight came out, in an issue written by Scott Lobdell. But they are all mutants first. The ethnic, social, sexual, gender, political, or religious markers are secondary identities the larger society imposed upon them before they established their mutanthood. There are good reasons for these markers. They signal the sources for the comics’ metaphors and draw distinctions between those who humiliate and those who are humiliated.

For a long time the ethnic background of Magneto, the master of magnetism, the head of the Brotherhood and the X-Men’s arch-nemesis, was unknown. Then in 1981 Claremont invented his backstory. Magneto was a Holocaust survivor. At first, the comics hinted he was a Romani. Some years later, after a bit of narrative wavering, it was established that Magneto was a Jew.

2.
The moral universe of the X-Men was always complicated, but Claremont upset the Manichean balance of the superhero world. The rosters of both the X-Men and the Brotherhood have changed and continue to change dramatically. Members of the X-Men have left to join the Brotherhood. Members of the Brotherhood have left to join the X-Men. Some have left to form their own third or fourth groups. Everyone has a different take on what it means to be a mutant in a non-mutant world. Sometimes they work with the U.S. government and sometimes against it. Sometimes they work in groups indifferent to the functioning of homo sapiens politics. And no one is ever entirely a child of either Martin or Malcolm. When I first got into the X-Men in the 1980s, Magneto had taken off his metal helmet and had joined the X-Men. Within a few years, he had returned to his life as a separatist.

The moral balance always tips in favor of the X-Men, but an intelligent reader never really knows which side he wants to join. The members of the X-Men are better-looking. They live in a dream mansion. They are comrades. Yet there are always problems within their ranks, jealousies, difficult romances. In the movies, Patrick Stewart plays Xavier with a Picard-ian paternalism, but in the comics he’s a strange man — Lee and Kirby looked to Yul Brynner for Xavier’s exoticism — constantly living within his own and others’ heads. His students suspect the telepath of controlling their minds. The good professor demands of them a strict adherence to an ideology only he seems to fully understand and, against all their instincts, he asks them to be what liberal humans want them to be, the mutant equivalents of “respectable Negros.” “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent,” Orwell said of Gandhi.

Magneto, blue-eyed and silver-haired, is a more charismatic figure, a man who tells you exactly what you want to believe about yourself. “You’re a god among insects,” Ian Mckellen’s Magneto tells a young protégé in X-Men 2. He meets homo sapien supremacy with mutant supremacy. The X-Men have their freaks, the Beast and Nightcrawler, but the Brotherhood is an uglier group, closer to the way the rest of us actually look. Magneto makes deals with supervilllains and he constantly hatches plots of mass murder, but always with one aim in mind, the survival of mutantkind.

Charles Xavier maintains a steady faith in the world into which he is born. In The Uncanny X-Men #141 (January 1981), Xavier sits in a senate hearing alongside his fellow pro-mutant activist Moira MacTaggert as they listen to Senator Kelly debate the possibility of mutant registration. MacTaggert makes the right call. “Registration of mutants today, gas chambers tomorrow.” Xavier answers, “[Kelly is] scared. We must teach him that his fear is unfounded.” Charles Xavier’s optimism is rooted in his powers. He can read the minds of all humans and can see, somewhere beneath the riot of their synapses, something that bends towards decency. He is a mutant Mencius.

Still, one wonders what Xavier hears when he listens to other people’s thoughts. Does he believe Kelly is incapable of creating camps because he is essentially a good man or because, when he senses the senator’s darker thoughts, he can’t believe them and simply ignores them? Magneto serves as Xavier’s counterbalance. Though the comics cast him as something close to but not entirely a supervillain, he’s not always wrong. He is unable to read the thoughts of human beings, but he knows a Nazi when he sees one.

3.
It wasn’t until 2008, in Greg Pak and Carmine Di Giandomenico’sMagneto: Testament, that Marvel fully described Magneto’s childhood. Magneto, née Max Eisenhardt, grew up in 1930s Germany, the son of a Jewish watchmaker. In an attempt to impress a young Romani girl named Magda he enters and wins a javelin competition using his powers over metal against a group of Aryan youth. Tensions rise and the family escapes to Poland. Eventually Max finds himself in Auschwitz, staring across the fence at Magda, who is interned in the Gypsy section of the camp.

The book answers the most pressing question about Magneto’s life: How could a young man with god-like powers over metal not kill every single Nazi in Auschwitz and liberate his fellow inmates? To answer the question, Pak’s story pointed to the machinery of the camp, the divide-and-conquer strategy that the Nazis employed against their inmates. He also points to the fear that any uprising would have led to the deaths of more Jews. Throughout the book, his fellow inmates warn Max that for every Nazi he kills thousands of Jews and Romanis would die in retaliation. The Max Eisenhardt in Pak and Di Giandomenico’s book is a sweet, loving boy, a young romantic. And he maintains a gentility all the way to the end of his tenure as a sonderkommando who shoves old men and young boys together in ovens because they burn more quickly.

That sweet boy dies within a few years after the book’s conclusion and is replaced by a cynical man bent on survival by any means necessary. His attempts at revenge change from one crisis to the next, but they always lean towards some form of violence. Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men movies depict the extent he’s willing to go to protect his own kind.

At the end of X-Men, Xavier’s team foils Magneto’s plot to transform all the world’s humans into mutants. Magneto’s process is deadly, an unfortunate fact the X-Men know and he doesn’t. If he had succeeded he would have committed, albeit inadvertently, mass murder one thousand times greater than Hitler’s.

At the end of X-Men 2, the X-Men and Magneto foil a plot by a rogue fanatic who attempts to use Cerebro, a machine Xavier and Magneto co-invented, to kill every mutant on earth. Magneto then attempts to use Cerebro to murder, this time with clear intention, every human on the planet. He does not succeed.

4.
The Holocaust victim, in our popular imagination, is a man of goodwill. He is the figure who tells you never to accept bigotry, that life is worth living, that violence is evil and that survival is a blessing. He is Elie Wiesel standing up for the victims of Darfur and the Khmer Rouge and teaching the lessons of his life story to Oprah Winfrey’s audience. He is a Jew laying a stone on Oskar Schindler’s grave in living color. He is Roberto Benigni clown-marching to the gas chambers, comforting his son. She is Anne Frank believing in the essential goodness of humankind even when faced with all evidence to the contrary.

These stories all carry the sheen of political correctness and they all ignore the mess of post-1945 politics. Wiesel may have called for Israel to take in refugees from Darfur, but he’s also one of the more prominent apologists for the Israeli right wing. It’s amazing how many monuments quote Frank without acknowledging her famous line’s horrible irony. The stone-laying scene at the end of Schindler’s List is a happy summation to the world’s greatest tragedy, but on some level — the level at which we are watching actual survivors honor the man responsible for their survival — we can accept it. Benigni’s march, however, is a lie. There were stories of teachers and grandmothers who comforted children marked for death, but Benigni’s martyred clown is incapable of tears. He’s an insult to the many millions who went to the chambers without idiot smiles on their faces.

These myths ignore the suicides among survivors, the depressive rage among children of survivors. Far more people read these myths than open The Immortal Bartfuss or Kaddish for a Child Not Born. Our attachment to these myths form the basis of an indictment. No one believes in Auschwitz because no one wants to believe in Auschwitz.

The many storytellers who have handled Magneto have then, in their own way, and through accident and emendation, achieved something remarkable. They have given mainstream popular culture a Holocaust survivor who understands exactly what was murdered in Auschwitz and who refuses to accept any sentimental definitions of survival.

By turning a Jewish Holocaust survivor into a mass murderer, these writers and artists ignore some terrible implications. The myths in Marvel Comics, half-formed and always more outlined than fully examined, lend themselves to an open reading on the part of fans. How do you read Magneto in a world in which the Holocaust is cited by cheap commentators in every human conflict?

You can read Magneto as the fantasy of every post-1945 anti-Semite. He is the Jew who will exert his powers to the absolute degree necessary and then even further, in order to gain his rightful pound of flesh. He is the Jew who screams “Auschwitz” whenever you question the bombings in Lebanon or Gaza, the Jew who will murder and burn his way to safety, ignoring all the children he may incinerate on the way.

You can read Magneto as the nightmare of every post-1945 Jewish humanist. He is the Jew who lost the soulful liberalism of the Yiddishkeit, and who has allowed the Holocaust to turn him into everything he despises. He is the Jew who will bomb Gaza and say, with some credibility, that it is for defense while privately acknowledging a pleasure in revenge. He is the Jew who has allowed the Holocaust to instill in him a debilitating paranoia, an inability to love or trust anyone who is not a Jew, as well as an inability to love or trust most of his fellow Jews.

The two caricatures have a lot in common.

There are other readings as well. Magneto is a wailing child demanding a return of his family and his culture, who now dresses up in metal armor to protect him from the anger of the world as well as his own. He’s a boy who saw God gassed alive and sees no difference anymore between writing “God” and writing “G-d”. He’s also something that none of the writers or artists who have handled him and none of the X-Men readers can know, something only the devil can name.

5.
I’m a fan of the X-Men, but I also believe that superhero comics and superhero movies have no business standing anywhere near the gates of Auschwitz, and the X-Men movies and comics have done nothing to correct this claim. Chris Claremont was and is a miserable writer. His monotonous, somber narration can’t differentiate between Magneto’s experiences during World War II and a fight scrimmage at Xavier’s school. Di Giandomenico’s painterly strokes make his Auschwitz Jews a little too beautiful and his book too easy to look at. Bryan Singer’s depiction of the gates of Auschwitz at the beginning of X-Men is no more menacing than the criminal lairs in The Usual Suspects, a movie he made five years prior. A superhero movie, which treats the threat of apocalypse as an opportunity for adventure, has an unsolvable problem when faced with an actual historical case of mass death. It should avoid this problem.

Still the X-Men movies and comics do something that the more respectable Holocaust movies of mass culture don’t do. At the end of Schindler’s List, the black-and-white of the distant Holocaust past turns to color as the elderly Schindler Jews emerge to plant stones on their savior’s grave. The scene provides closure and catharsis. Spielberg concentrates his camera only on the Jews who live happily forward all the way to the end of the 20th century and buries the Holocaust safely in the past where it can’t hurt anyone after 1945.

Magneto stands as a rebuke to that burial and as a rebuke to everyone who wishes to contain the lessons of the Holocaust, to everyone who has a simple explanation for its occurrence, to everyone who wishes to valorize victimhood, to everyone who believes that survival is an unmitigated blessing. The X-Men movies and the comics tell you things you don’t want to hear, that Hitler won World War II, that the Holocaust never stopped happening, that it continues to happen and that it will keep happening. They tell you these things even if their action narratives, their melodrama, their wit, and their fascination with lithe bodies don’t allow you to feel them. The writers and artists behind the X-Men don’t believe in Auschwitz, not only because they don’t wish to believe in Auschwitz, but also because they can’t believe the very things they are telling themselves.